[Mezzie]

Depending on your disease, you may not have a choice. Take a sick leave and make some pretty thorough plans, get yourself a therapist + possibly a psych, and reconsider what your career path is going to look like.

I'm coming at this from the POV of somebody with MS. One thing to do now is pick up some kind of side hustle or project work outside of your main employment - even if it's only ~ 5 hrs a week. This way if you ever need to leave a W2 situation suddenly due to your disease, you can keep doing the side hustle and therefore avoid a gap on your resume. One of the hardest parts of my diagnosis was that since I presented during my final semester of grad school I had no health insurance and therefore had to not work for a while in order to be eligible for Medicaid so I could get my medication regime worked out for my symptoms so I could work. Explaining that resume gap has been hell - anything you can do to avoid looking like you did nothing is gold.

If your physical health is likely to go downhill in the next few years, you need to redo all of your financial plans. Your incentives have drastically changed.

[mostlysimilar]

Can you expand more on what "explaining that resume gap has been hell" means?

[Mezzie]

Prospective employers often want to know why there's a gap on your resume. My gap was because at the time I was too sick for a full-time job so I had to rely on Medicaid which meant I couldn't do pretty much any 'real' work at all until my health was straightened out. There's no way to answer without talking about the fact that I'm sick.

Now it's been long enough that most places don't ask but when I did get my health together and looked at getting back into the formal workforce it made it really hard to get a job. "Why haven't you worked since you graduated?" "...weeeell..."